She follows me by six years but, in ways, it feels like 12 — the split between my oldest child and hers. At times, our distance was expansive — I left for college as a seventeen year old sophomore and she stayed behind, 11, in many ways. During my single formative educational year in Minnesota, Mary became passionate about words on pages, blogs, coffee cups, and souls. This was the season of the quotable Starbucks cups, of poetry magnets on refrigerators, just north of ‘zines and just south of Facebook. We were writing on the newly formed blog platforms like Angelfire and baring our souls to strangers through AIM chatrooms — ripe scenarios for grooming and conditioning, for unfair expectations of intimacy or shock value — and whatever I was writing Mary was reading and mimicking and hoping to do, too.
I wasn’t much interested in my little sister, then. It wasn’t so much the early pangs of replacement I’d experienced when she burst into the world, wide shouldered and angry, tearing my mother’s midsection for the first time, and the last time — when every other delivery would be and had been natural. Mary was supernatural — busy and big and wide eyed with big cheeks and energy that she remembers as “second string” or “side kick” and I remember as “all encompassing” and powerful. It’s amazing how young we are when our self perception shifts and wiggles, warps and cowers, lifts and locks and loads. I wrote the occasional letter to her…
